Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You had that experience as well. Both of you were security industry insiders and had lots of insight into what’s happening. The reason why I’m asking for this background is that security is probably the segment of the startup industry that has the maximum entrepreneurial activity. It’s crowded. There’s constant startup activity going on. Unless you have a really good handle on the ecosystem, it’s very difficult to do security companies.

Aki Eldar: I absolutely agree with you. This is also one of the reasons why it was really hard at the beginning. Do you know a bit about Data Leakage Prevention?

Sramana Mitra: A little bit, yes.

Aki Eldar: It’s also dealing with data protection but in a totally different way. It’s not protecting the data itself. It’s protecting the infrastructure against data loss and data leakage. This space was really crowded when we started Secure Islands. Only security experts understood our vision. One of them was Shlomo Kramer, who I assume you know.

Sramana Mitra: I know of. I don’t know him personally.

Aki Eldar: He’s one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs that I know worldwide. He became a billionaire. He ran very successful companies. One of them is Check Point. He was one of Check Point’s founders. He was on the Board in one of the seed investors in Palo Alto Networks. He has a lot of experience. He understood our vision immediately and said, “Absolutely. This is it.”

Sramana Mitra: Your vision was to actually protect the data and not data loss prevention at the infrastructure level. That’s the key positioning point that you went after?

Aki Eldar: It’s not only data leakage because once you’re protecting the data itself, a lot of horizons open for the organization. Because you’re protecting the data itself, you’re receiving a solution for collaboration because you’re protecting the data itself. Data leakage doesn’t really deal with that. You’re providing a solution if the data is in mobile devices or in the cloud. It’s a totally new paradigm. It’s a paradigm shift. One of the things that we’re doing is also data leakage.

Eight years ago, it was hard for people to understand what we’re doing because DLP was the hottest segment in security. We came up with a new way and said, “DLP will not be able to scale.” I’m not saying there’s no place for DLP but DLP will not solve the problem of protecting sensitive information from all threats. Today, a lot of organizations are adopting our solution even though they are using DLP. Others are using our solution instead of DLP. There are places for both but we believe that our approach will prevail because it’s actually giving the right answer to a multi-level problem. It’s a multi-dimensional problem.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Cyber Security Company from Israel: Aki Eldar, CEO of Secure Islands
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